November is National Adoption Month, and this year’s theme is Empowering Youth: Finding Points of Connection. Throughout November, we will be highlighting our recruiters who work tirelessly to find connections and homes for the children in Vermont waiting for their forever homes.
Meet Mark Simino
Title: Permanency Planning Counselor
Years of Service: 9 Years
Mark is a Permanency Planning Counselor for Project Family (a partnership between Lund and the Department for Children and Families) based out of the Hartford and Barre District Offices of DCF (he also serves St. Johnsbury, and occasionally some Burlington cases). Mark loves working with youth and finding new and fun ways to build trust and connection.
How do you build connections when in-person visits are not possible?
When the COVID pandemic first shut down so much of our face-to-face contact with the kids we work with, we very quickly switched to doing our meetings and visits over Zoom. Many of the youth that I work with did not like to do these visits via the screen, especially if they were already spending a lot of time in front of the screen for school and other meetings (now screen time for video games is another story!).
I started looking for a way to make video visits fun, and gaming seemed like a fun way to spend time and keep their attention. I researched ways to interact online and found a downloadable battleship board to email to my youth before a visit. They could print it off, I could do the same, and we could play during our visits. Many of the younger kids who were having a tough time staying on screen for any amount of time seemed to respond well to this. The nice part of this game was that it was interactive. There was a call and response and the reward of sinking an opponent’s ship. I found that I could engage them in conversations while playing, and this allowed me to maintain and, in many cases grow my connection with the youths I was working with.
What do you enjoy about this role?
What I like about this role is that I get to work with some absolutely amazing youth! I get to help them find their forever family, help find family members that they didn’t know about, or make a plan for what happens next for them. I have been working with youth my entire adult life and my work at Lund has been the most rewarding for me. The outcomes are often positive in this role, and those moments fill up my batteries.
How do you build trust with the youth that you work with?
Connection is a huge part of this recruitment role. Building a trusting and caring relationship with the youth that I work with is important to every part of the work. Many of the youth I work with have every reason not to trust others. The world has shown them that trust means someone has power over them. And all too often, the people that they are supposed to be able to trust have taken advantage of or abused that trust.
Earning a youth’s trust is not easy. It takes slow and careful work. I start by sharing a few simple rules about myself.
- First, that they will always get the truth from me, I may not be able to share everything all the time, but I will answer honestly. The downside is that there will be times when they will not like me because of those answers, and that is okay.
- Secondly, I don’t make many promises. There are few things that are completely under my control, and if I make a promise, I need to be able to keep it.
- Thirdly, I make sure that they know that they will be safe with me. If they know that they are safe with you, they are more likely to be a part of the process. If they can open themselves up to me, I can help them open up to others who will be a part of their lives forever.
I have been very lucky to have had some really good connections with the youth I have worked with. Many of them have reached out even after I have stopped working with them. Often, it just takes being open, safe, and simply showing up to build trust and connection.
